Photo: Christopher Smith/For the Washington Post.
Mackenzie Cannon works at the café/post office in Bucyrus, Kansas, where residents of the tiny town were determined to keep their Zip code.
When I was a kid in New York State, a friend of my parents who was an artist and weaver decided he ought to also have a job with benefits and became postmaster of a tiny rural post office. His name was Earl. Today I’m drawn to an article about the creation of a coffee shop called Earl’s that saved a rural post office in Kansas from the chopping block.
Annie Gowen writes at the Washington Post, “ There was no ribbon cutting. No balloon arch. When the clerk threw open the doors of the post office in this tiny Kansas town, she got right to business, handing out P.O. box keys and selling stamps.
“ ‘Welcome to the new post office!’ Mackenzie Cannon, the clerk, called out this week to one of the new customers. …
“Bucyrus —population: 168 — is only about 35 miles south of Kansas City, but enough farmland and red barns sit between the last suburban subdivision and the town’s quiet main street that it still feels like country. It offers little in the way of excitement, unless you count Fourth of July fireworks and the time that an F5 tornado narrowly missed the town in 1957. But for people like Cannon, 29, the close-knit place is home — the word she had tattooed on her shoulder.
“ ‘The older I get the more I realize how special it is,’ Cannon said.
“Two years ago, the U.S. Postal Service decided to shutter its decrepit outpost here. It was so old, ‘the ceiling fell in while I was working,’ Cannon recalled. The plan was to transfer mail operations to a nearby town, and locals feared they would lose their Zip code, which they felt was akin to wiping Bucyrus off the map.
“ ‘That ain’t happenin’,’ Greg Foote, the scion of a local ranching family, said when he heard the news. He and his colleague Aaron Kuhlmann hatched a plan to build a new post office in a building that would also house the town’s only cafe in decades.
“A spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service praised this ‘unique arrangement’ that has allowed the agency to keep delivering the mail in town. They said removing a Zip code was a rare occurrence.
“ ‘I just felt like it was the right thing to do for the area, to keep that Bucyrus pride going and keep that Zip code alive,’ Foote said.
“Foote’s family has farmed here since the ’40s, starting with a small dairy operation and then corn and soybean farm owned by his grandfather, Earl, the founder and first president of the Kansas Corn Growers Association.
“Foote’s father, Bob, founded Foote Cattle Company in 1985, which has grown to become one of the largest feedlot and ranching operations in the country.
“Bob, who died in 2022, and his wife, Gail, saved the Bucyrus post office once before. When the 1921-era building was first threatened with closure in 1991, the couple stepped in, rehabbed it and leased it back to the Postal Service for 30 years. But by 2024, it was beyond repair.
“The post office ‘was always a gathering space,’ Gail Foote said this week. It was the center of the community she calls ‘the best place on Earth, really.’
“Behind the counter Tuesday, Cannon recounted how when she was a child growing up in Bucyrus, she spent most of her time in the backyard making mud pies or collecting cicadas. …
“ ‘Is there stuff going on?’ she said of life in Bucyrus. ‘There’s tractors going down the road — that’s something!’
“Trains barrel by, too, horns blaring, just steps from the post office. The Union Pacific doesn’t stop there anymore. …
” ‘Foote named the cafe Earl’s Coffee Company after his grandpa, whose pictures adorn the walls alongside images of local ranch hands like Tubby, who died recently. The steak burrito is named ‘the Tub’ after him, and his daughter can’t come in without crying.
“The cafe sold out of food the first five days, Kuhlmann said, and he had to buy three new refrigerators to keep up with demand.
“On Tuesday, a steady stream of customers came by. The cafe smelled like espresso and fresh lumber. New ‘Earl’s’ T-shirts were neatly folded in the merchandise corner.
“The sleeves read 66013 — the Zip code they helped save.”
More at the Post, here.
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